“This work takes days, weeks, months and sometimes years but we have to keep going.”
Professor David Ranson, Forensic Pathologist and former Deputy Director of the VIFM, was one of the team from Australia, who helped identify victims.
David had already worked on many international and local disasters and had a pragmatic approach to the tsunami rescue mission.
He explains the infrastructure necessary for success.
It is sobering to realise that it is 20 years ago that the Asia-Pacific region was devastated by the tsunami that took so many lives. It was particularly hard since local victims died together with the many international visitors, including tourists and holidaymakers whose love for the lands and the peoples of the many countries affected, lead them to places where they expected to be safe but tragically, ultimately caused their deaths.
Such a natural disaster is hardly unprecedented but it is rare indeed for a tsunami to cause the death of so many people from around the world. With a mass fatality event of this scale, no individual country has the capacity to undertake the emergency response levels required and this is particularly true of the massive task posed by the need to identify and repatriate the dead.
With an open disaster (one where we do not even have a list of the missing) the task of Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) teams is made particularly difficult.
The environment of this disaster with many people dying in both main centres and remote locations where the infrastructure of essential services such as power, water, transport and communications were also damaged and often unreliable, created added additional logistic challenges for the DVI teams.
When I arrived at just one of the many, many DVI operation centres in Thailand, I found myself confronted by hundreds of dead. Given the tropical nature of the climate, decomposition was a striking feature of many of the victims rendering visual identification by family and friends impossible.
The staff of the VIFM had quickly integrated with the international DVI teams and had taken on a number of leadership roles within the mortuary.
Initially we were working in a rapidly modified Buddhist temple where we shared the site with the monks and people from local communities as well as chickens and other animals. There were a few fans duct taped to the ceiling to move the hot air, but little in the way of air conditioning or ventilation systems.
The work was hot, smelly and tiring and we would move from case to case examining the deceased and recording any identifying features as well as collecting samples for subsequent forensic examination.
Everyone had their role – photographer, scribe, specimen collector, pathologist, mortuary manager, clothing washer, property examiner, body transporter and storage controller – and we all needed to work together and to help each other as needed.
At the same time, we needed to watch and support each other, for this work is always emotionally and physically challenging and it is all too easy for DVI personnel to overstretch themselves for the benefit of the deceased’s love ones and to their own detriment. This work takes days, weeks, months and sometimes years but we have to keep going.
Every case, every disaster, prepares us for the next one and so we learn from our experiences and improve our capability and capacity to respond and return the dead in a timely fashion to their families and loved ones.
